90 MEET IN MOSCOW AT RIGHTS SEMINAR

By FELICITY BARRINGER, Special to the New York Times

Published: December 11, 1987

MOSCOW, Dec. 10—
An independent international human rights seminar, stripped of its meeting hall, some leaders and many participants, nonetheless brought 90 people together today to discuss the persecution, hardship and faith that animates the Soviet human rights movement.

Human rights campaigners from the United States, Czechoslovakia, and Sweden came to Moscow for the event, giving it an international scope that is highly unusual for an unsanctioned political event here. But would-be participants from Poland and West Germany were denied soviet visas.

Speaking over a makeshift loudspeaker system, Lev M. Timofeyev, the organizer, opened the four-day seminar with a roll call of 56 men whom these people count as ''prisoners of conscience'' and who, over the last 16 years, have died in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals.

As the last name, that of Anatoly Marchenko, hung in the air, the participants bowed their heads for a moment of silence. Then Larisa Bogoraz, widow of Mr. Marchenko - who died in Chistopol Prison on Dec. 8, 1986 after a hunger strike - stood up to tell of the movement's trials and martyrs. Sanction From Authorities

Soviet authorities, in the last week, have thrown numerous legal and logistical obstacles in the seminar's way.

The harassment continued today as organizers arrived at a banquet hall they had reserved to find it locked with a sign on the door saying ''Sanitary day. Closed for cleaning.''

Four organizers were arrested on suspicion of narcotics violations while en route to Moscow. Several foreign participants, including Petra Kelly, head of West Germany's Green Party, were denied visas. One would-be participant, Venik Silhan of Czechoslovakia, was detained at the Prague Airport on his way to a Moscow-bound plane, according to Jan Urban, a fellow member of the group Charter 77. 'Not Ready to Stop It'

That the seminar is taking place at all, Mr. Timofeyev said later, ''is a small but real step forward.'' At another moment he said the Soviet authorities ''are not ready to completely stop it - they are not ready for a first-class scandal.''

After arriving at the locked banquet hall, the participants then regrouped in a three-room apartment. During the next two hours, people whose activities and beliefs represented the spectrum of dissent and discontent in the Soviet union met and mingled.

The Rev. Gleb Yakunin, an orthodox priest, hugged Naum S. Meiman, a 76-year-old Jewish mathematician long denied permission to emigrate. An artist and former psychiatric patient hung up a banner for disarmament. Invisibility of Disabled

Two pentecostalists discussed emigration with Viktor Fulmakht, a Soviet Jew recently given permission to leave. Yuri Kiselev, a double amputee, struck up a conversation about the invisibility of the disabled here.

''Most of the participants here are used to giving independent opinions,'' Mr. Timofeyev said shortly before the meeting started. ''They've gone to prison for it.''

But the shadow of the recent harassment and the twilight lives of many of the organizers were never far from conversation. Mr. Timofeyev, one of the prisoners released this year, pointed out that most of these men and women have not been able to obtain the jobs and official recognition that would signify full return to Soviety society.

The authorities' attitude toward independent expressions of opinion, one onlooker noted, could be gauged by the evening's events downtown at Pushkin Square, a traditional gathering spot for campaigners, marking Dec. 10 as International Human Rights Day.

According to this witness, the square was ringed with militia cars. All those without authorization to take part in the official peace demonstration inside the barriers ''couldn't get within 100 yards of the Pushkin statue.''

Elsewhere in Moscow, an official observance of Human Rights Day was led by the Central Council of Trade Unions. The Tass report on the event stressed the United States failure to join certain international covenants including the 1948 convention on genocide and a 1973 convention on apartheid. Three Months of Attempts

''As I see it, the positions of the two major world powers on the issue of citizens rights and freedoms are poles apart,'' said Gennadi Yanayev, secretary of the union council.

At a news conference before the opening of the unofficial human rights seminar, Mr. Timofeyev said he tried for three months to gain official sanction for the event, without success.

But, he said, he took official silence as a positive sign until this week, when, in addition to the other forms of harassment, would-be participants in Moscow, Riga, Vilnius, Kiev and Odessa were told that participation in the event would be considered a violation of law as the organizing group has not been officially registered. Demonstration in Prague

PRAGUE, Dec. 10 (Reuters) - More than 1,000 Czechoslovaks defied an official ban and staged a peaceful demonstration in central Prague toay to mark United Nations Human Rights Day.

The Czechoslovak human rights organization Charter 77 had written to the authorities asking for permission to stage a demonstration but the request was turned down last week.